Dreaming about illness
Dreams do not detect illness. That is the most important sentence here, and it needs saying because the opposite claim is common, is frightening, and has no evidence behind it.
Also searched as: being ill in a dream, sick, a diagnosis, disease, feeling unwell
Reports divide into being ill, watching somebody else be ill, and being told something.
The told version runs into the same problem every information dream does: the content does not survive. Dreamers report having been given a diagnosis and being unable to say what it was.
Fever dreams are a distinct and genuinely different category. People describe them for years: intensely vivid, repetitive, often involving scale, texture or an unsolvable task, and they are a real phenomenon associated with raised temperature.
Health-anxiety dreams track the anxiety, and the frequency follows it up and down.
Common associations
- Worry, which is what these dreams contain.
- Information that does not survive, in the diagnosis reports.
- Fever, which produces its own recognisable kind of dream.
- Vulnerability, in the general case.
Positive readings
The reassurance is the point: a dream about being ill is not evidence of being ill.
Some dreamers report a health dream prompting a check-up they had been avoiding, which is a good outcome from a dream that told them nothing.
Difficult readings
These dreams can cause real fear, and health anxiety feeds them, which feeds the anxiety.
The database will not hedge the practical point: if you have symptoms, see a doctor. Not because of a dream, and not despite one. A dream is not a reason either way, and treating it as one is the actual risk here.
Psychological perspectives
Continuity accounts for the distribution: people who are worried about their health, or caring for somebody ill, have these dreams.
Incorporation is real but modest. Bodily sensations can be woven into dream content, which is a much weaker claim than detection, and the two get conflated constantly, including by people who should know better.
Fever dreams are the interesting case. Elevated temperature is associated with a distinctive kind of dream experience, and the phenomenology is consistent enough across reports to be recognisable.
Cultural and historical
Dream incubation for healing was a formal practice in the ancient Mediterranean, with dedicated temple sites where people slept in order to receive a curative or diagnostic dream.
That is a real historical practice and the database records it as one. It is not evidence that the practice worked.
The modern version, that a dream can warn of illness, circulates widely and is not supported.
What the sleep science says
Well established: dream content follows waking health concerns.
Reasonably supported: bodily sensations can be incorporated into dreams, and fever is associated with a distinctive dream phenomenology.
Not established, and stated flatly: any diagnostic or predictive capability.
Your own context
- Are you actually worried about something?
- Were you told a diagnosis, and can you recall it?
- Did you have a temperature?
- Is there a real symptom you have been ignoring?
If this recurs
Where there is a real health concern, the dreams follow it and the action is medical.
Where there is not, log frequency against anxiety. The pattern is nearly always the worry rather than the body.
Emotions often reported
- anxiety
- dread
- helplessness
- confusion
- fatigue
- fear
Specific illness dreams
Each of these is written separately, not generated from this page.
Questions for reflection
These are for your journal, not for us. Nothing you write is shared.
- What am I actually worried about?
- Did I have a temperature?
- Is there a symptom I should get looked at?
Dream interpretation is subjective. Nothing here is a diagnosis, a prediction, or medical advice.
Sources and reviewed references
4 references. What these labels mean
- 1.Gender Differences in Dream Recall: A Meta-AnalysisPeer-reviewed research
Michael Schredl and Iris Reinhard (2008) · Journal of Sleep Research
Cited for: Dream-recall frequency as a measurable, individually stable trait, and the factors that move it.
- 2.The Scientific Study of Dreams: Neural Networks, Cognitive Development and Content AnalysisAcademic book
G. William Domhoff (2003) · American Psychological Association
Cited for: The continuity hypothesis (that dream content largely reflects waking concerns) and a sustained critique of symbolic dream interpretation as an evidential method.
- 3.Dreams and Experience in Classical AntiquityAcademic book
William V. Harris (2009) · Harvard University Press
Cited for: How dreams were recorded, classified and used in Greek and Roman practice, including temple incubation and the interpretive traditions around it.
- 4.Oneirocritica (The Interpretation of Dreams)Historical dream record
Artemidorus of Daldis (200)
Cited for: The earliest surviving systematic dream dictionary, and evidence that dream interpretation has been organised by symbol and by the dreamer's circumstances for at least eighteen centuries.
Dreamers’ accounts
How dreams of illness have gone for other people, in their own words. Nothing here is an interpretation of anyone else's dream. It is a record of what happened and what it was like.
Nothing here yet. Be the first to say how this has gone for you.
Related records
- SymbolSkinSkin reports are the ones most likely to have a real physical cause, and the physical question should be asked first. Itching, crawling and heat are all sensations a sleeping body can genuinely produce.
- SymbolHeartThe heart is the body part most likely to be reporting something real. Heart rate genuinely rises during REM and during nightmares, and a dream about a racing heart is frequently a dream about a racing heart.
- PersonDoctorDoctors appear in dreams mostly around waiting and around being told something. The reports are dominated by an appointment that does not happen and by a diagnosis the dreamer cannot afterwards recall.
- PlaceHospitalHospital dreams divide sharply between people with recent hospital experience, for whom they are usually literal, and everyone else, for whom they tend to carry vulnerability and loss of control.
- SymbolSweating and heatHeat in a dream is frequently heat in the room, and that is checkable in one night. Where it is not, night sweats have medical causes worth knowing about rather than interpreting.
- SymbolBack and shouldersTwo quite different things share this entry: carrying weight, which frequently tracks a real ache, and the sense of something behind you, which is the being-watched material approached from the body.
If you have this one often
A dream that frightens you and keeps coming back is its own subject. The nightmares section covers what is known about why they recur, the one rewriting technique with real evidence behind it, and when a nightmare stops being a dream problem and becomes something a clinician should hear about.
Records that mention illness
These pages link to illness, either as something reported in the same dream or as a related subject. This page does not point back at all of them, so the list is assembled rather than chosen.